A story
A summer pool, and Newport
In July 1967 Toni Frissell photographed a swimmer in a turquoise pool, twice. Five years earlier she had filed a Newport golf picture under Rejects. All three are in the Library of Congress, and all three are here.
July 1967, two frames
The Pool, July 1967, is Library of Congress item 2021736531. Afternoon Swim, 1967, is item 2021736534. Both are in the Toni Frissell Collection. Both carry no known restrictions on publication, and both credits say she donated her photographs and the rights to the Library in the 1970s. The place on each piece is a summer pool. The year is 1967.
The first record says a swimmer cuts across a turquoise pool on a 1967 summer shoot, and that her late color work is the closest public-domain cousin to the pool pictures people associate with that decade. The second record says it is the same July 1967 session: a single swimmer, flat blue water, and a clipped green lawn. The shop's note on that second print quotes a line about attractive people and attractive places. The line is not repeated here. The photograph does not need it. What the record establishes is the session, the water, and the lawn.
What the two frames are for
They are not a before and after. They are two positions in one afternoon, or at least two negatives the Library filed as the same July. One is the swimmer crossing. One is the swimmer, the flat water, and the grass. Hung as a pair they stay a session. Separated, each one still has a call number.
Frissell's earlier beach pictures, from 1948, put fashion on sand. These put a swimmer in a private-looking pool and leave the name of the house off the record. The pieces do not name a host. They name a month.
Newport, filed under Rejects
Newport Links, 1962, is Library of Congress item 2021727799. The credit gives call number LC-F905-25369 and the same gift of photographs and rights. The story on the piece says the frame comes from a 1962 Newport shoot that Frissell filed under Rejects, and that Newport Country Club hosted the first U.S. Open and the first U.S. Amateur in 1895.
A reject in her file is still a photograph she kept long enough for the Library to receive it. The club's 1895 tournaments are the history the piece attaches to the lawn. The picture is the 1962 shoot. No known restrictions on publication. Three frames, two years, one collection.
The item numbers are 2021736531, 2021736534, and 2021727799. Newport's call number, LC-F905-25369, is the only one of the three the credit spells out. The pool pictures name the month and the water and stop. They do not name the owner of the pool, the town, or the swimmer. Leaving those blanks is more accurate than filling them.
Five years sit between the golf lawn and the summer pool. The file called one of them a reject and kept the others without that word. Both kinds of negative reached the same collection, under the same rights line, because she gave the photographs and the rights to the Library in the 1970s. That gift is the reason a July afternoon and a rejected Newport frame can be printed at all.
Newport Country Club's first U.S. Open and first U.S. Amateur, both in 1895, are the only dates on that piece besides 1962. They explain the lawn, not the exposure. The pool pictures explain themselves with a month, July 1967, and a color of water the records call turquoise and flat blue. No house name appears. A caption that added one would be guessing. The lawn in the second frame is described as clipped and green, and that is the whole setting.
